On the way there, walking down busy Philadelphia streets, sweating profusely from the weight of my backpack and the unfortunate choice of a long-sleeve shirt, I started to think about how impossible this would have been just a few short years ago.  Social technology keeps us connected in ways we don’t always know or even understand.

As I pondered those thoughts about how cool it is for three people from Tennessee and South Carolina to want to share their connectedness at a coffee shop with hundreds, if not thousands, of other people to whom we are all connected, I also thought about how all this became possible.  Not the technology.  The connections.

I owe all of that to a phone call from Discovery Education’s Gerard Newsome some six years ago.  They were inviting two people from each state to something new in Silver Spring.  He didn’t know really how to tell me what it was or what the agenda was.  And I had to pay for my own transportation to get there.  But they would provide a hotel and some food, and we would all figure this thing out as we went along.  I was both intrigued and committed.

It was a phenomenal time.  I met some great people.  In fact, I met a lot of great people.

Later, when I needed some help putting together a conference at our middle school, I called Gerard.  He hooked me up with Lance Rougeux as a keynote speaker (Don’t Look at the Duck), and then got on the phone to some others who were part of this new group called the Discovery Educator Network.  They all congregated in Cleveland, TN.  They came at their own expense.  They came from TN and GA. They trained people for free.

And bonds of friendship were formed that will never be broken.

I can’t take the time here to try to mention them all.  I would fail miserably.  But they know who they are.  And hopefully, after reading this (I’m assuming they will, of course), they will feel the love.

Thanks, DEN!

But I have another group.  A more loosely organized group.  My PSN.  PSN stands for my Personal Suggestion Network.  This is really the heart of what Facebook is all about anyway.

When my friend, Sandy Pearson, learned that I was going to be in Orlando for nearly two weeks she sent me a private message on Facebook suggesting that I try a restaurant there called Urban Flats.  Urban Flats is run by a friend of hers.  It just turned out that this friend is also a graduate of Lee University…my alma mater.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Urban Flats sits smack downtown in Orlando.  It is surrounded by a host of other restaurants and bars and underneath a large movie theater.  Its slick, rounded facade, intimate tables, and picturesque view of the plaza made me immediately think if this was the 80s I would have found Yuppie Nirvana.

My reservation was made online for 6 PM.  At 5 I got a phone call to confirm my reservation and to ask if a high top table would be acceptable since Saturdays are very busy.  In 52 years of living (most of them spent eating out on a regular basis), I have never had a personal call to confirm a reservation.  I liked the place already.

The hostess and waitress were both extremely friendly and determined that I have an excellent experience.  I ordered their signature Urban Stix for an appetizer.  These are short, warm, pretzel sticks coated in sea salt and melted smoked gouda with a mustard dipping sauce.  Wonderful.

As the waitress came to take my order I asked, “Let’s assume that this is the only time I will ever be at Urban Flats.  What is the one thing I have to have in order to know I have really experienced what you have to offer?”  She pointed to the Black and Blue Flat and the Chicken Caesar Flat as two signature dishes, but her personal preference was the Chicken Caesar.  Chicken it was.  A wonderfully warm whole wheat flat bread topped with tangy barbequed chicken and smothered in a layer of Caesar salad.  My mouth had hit the jackpot.

And then I asked about dessert.  She named off all the things on the menu, and then mentioned something called a Zanga.  It was a warm pastry filled with cheesecake and cinnamon and then drizzled with caramel and chocolate sauce.  I don’t remember ever having a dessert I liked better.  I think my tongue was actually smiling.

And here’s the kicker.  Sandy and I have never met.  Somewhere along the way, we ran across each other in Twitter as being geographically close.  Her Twitter name caught my eye, and I started following her.  Or she started following me.  Everything is a blur after you turn 50.  Later, we friended one another on Facebook.

I would never have had this fantastic culinary delight if it weren’t for my PSN.  So keep those suggestions coming.  My life is richer for it.

Below is the Prezi I created to go with my talk.  The first few slides are simply screenshots from the “Did You Know?” video posted everywhere across the Internet.  There are two short video clips I added just to play in the background while I talked.  The first are images of the various kinds of technologies our students use every day.  The second is an abbreviated list of the software our district has provided teachers to help with instruction.  The main points of the Prezi are expanded below.

Know What’s Possible. Teachers do not expect their principals to be able to walk into a classroom and expertly demonstrate every piece of technology purchased for a school.  But administrators need to demonstrate life long learning as a daily practice, and learning about technology is part of the drill.  Read articles.  Read blogs.  Attend workshops.  Watch a webinar.  Find out what is possible with technology if you expect to lead in technology.

Demonstrate Technology in Your Own Practice. Create a PowerPoint presentation for faculty meetings.  Email a report as an attachment instead of stuffing mailboxes with paper.  Update your profile page on the school website regularly.  My rule of thumb is this: If you want to see how engaged a principal is with technology in his or her school, look at their personal profile on the school website.  Some are missing.  Others are still dated September when it is actually April.  And a few, a blessed few, update their page once a month like clockwork.  It doesn’t matter if YOU updated it, your secretary updates it, or one of your student aides updates it. The fact that you care enough to know it is updated speaks volumes to your teachers.

Give Teachers Time. Teachers will learn to use new technology the same way kids learn it.  They need time to goof off with it.  If you purchase a new software and expect your teachers to embrace it, cut back on planning time meetings.  Trim back after school faculty meetings.  Instead, tell every teacher to find time to just “play around” with the software.  It takes a huge amount of pressure off of them to “perform.”

Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train, Train…and Then Train Some More. I cannot even begin to express the frustration teachers feel when they new technology is “shoved down their throats” (a quote from a teacher friend), but no one gets trained on how to use it.  My suggestion is that administrators use the “I do, we do, you do” approach.  Go to the training yourself.  Show up in a teachers room and ask to help.  Then let them do it on their own.  Let me tell you how powerful and easy this is.  Our district has just purchased Interactive White Boards for nearly every classroom in the system.  Some are Promethean.  Some are SMART.  If the principal would just walk in one day and move some stuff around the screen with a pen or a finger or a koosh ball, not only will the students be impressed but the respect of the teachers will go up five fold.  Lack of training is the number one complaint of teachers regarding new technologies.  And if you offer training (or you have a tech coach that does training) make sure your teachers show up.

Know Your Limitations.  Most of the administrators I know are not technology experts.  Some still think that turning their monitor off is the same as turning off the PC.  So when you get ready to purchase new hardware or new software, understand that you are not the expert.  Get advice.  My former principal did this, and I really respected his final decision even though it wasn’t my recommendation.  We were deciding whether to go with SMART or Promethean.  Three teachers went to Promethean training and to SMART training.  Two of us came back with a recommendation for SMART boards.  One for Promethean.  However, the Promethean purchase was going to be about $10,000 cheaper.  That’s not chump change.  The principal got on the phone and called principals from other districts who had both boards.  He had the SMART and Promethean reps back in his office for several meetings to discuss all the options.  He truly struggled with this decision.  In the end, he went against my recommendation for SMART boards, but today I think he made the right decision for the school.

Always Consult the IT Department Before Making Any Decisions. Envision that statement with about twenty exclamation points at the end of it.  I would love to put Apple products in our classrooms, but our IT department doesn’t support them and they cannot connect to our server given its present setup.  What a waste of money if I decided to do that without consulting them first.  Or iPads.  I can envision a day when every student gets an iPad in kindergarten.  But will the infrastructure handle giving out enough IP addresses to let everyone get online at the same time?  Will it be better if maintenance or the IT department installs the new hardware?  Where should it sit in the room?  Do teachers need a desktop or laptop and docking station?  Your IT department is your friend.  Use them.

Always Choose The Technology To Fit The Lesson. Never Create the Lesson To Use The Technology. This lesson was brought home to me at the Discovery Leadership Institute last summer in a small group discussion about cell phones in the classroom.  Lisa Parisi, a fellow DEN member, made this statement to the group.  It is so easy to jump on the latest technology bandwagon and feel like you MUST use it in every lesson.  Just because you have a PC and a projector doesn’t mean every lesson has to be put into PowerPoint.  You don’t have to build every lesson in a SMART Notebook or Promethean Flipchart file.  When the technology is appropriate for the pedagogy, use it.  When it isn’t, shut it down.

It is at this point that I would be taking questions.  Instead, I’m going to ask one.  What did I miss?  What advice would YOU give new administrators about being a technology leader on his or her campus?

But there’s one other way teachers get a bum rap.  We get to make two sets of resolutions each year: One on January 1st and another sometime in August or September depending on what state in which one teaches.

Of course, not wanting to be an underachiever, I also set myself up for resolutions at the end of the last school year.

Like all good resolutions, we mean well.  We honestly intent to do things differently.  Sometimes we even succeed.  Other times we learn to tweak the resolutions so they are easy to complete.  Like this one from last New Year’s for me:

I will begin the process of losing 40 pounds.

And I did.  Several times.  In fact, I’m beginning that process again next week.  (Hey, we’re teachers.  We’re smart).

Here are just a few of the resolutions I’ve set for myself this school year.

1. Delegate more of my work among my team members.  I am one of those people that like to do my work and the work of thirteen other people.  It is time to give it up.
2. Learn all of my students’ names in the first three weeks of school.  I am horrible with names.  I think the only way I learned mine was from my mom writing it on the inside labels of my clothes when I went to church camp.
3. Find a working phone number for every student before the semester is over.  I’m giving myself a little more time here, but those of you who don’t teach would be surprised at the number of kids who don’t know a phone number for their parents.  Or a street address for their house.  Or what a pencil looks like.
4. Only grade what matters.  No more extra credit for bringing hand sanitizer.  Or getting a form signed.  Or staying awake in class.  (You can’t make this stuff up).
5. Refuse to allow a single student to leave my class without learning the things I intended for them to learn.

OK, I really only wrote all those to get to that last one.  It is this dogged determination to see kids learn that keeps us coming back to the classroom every year.

I will let the teachers, admins, school board members, and other members of PLN that read this blog hold me accountable to these resolutions.  Feel free to ask anytime how I’m doing.  If my answer starts with, “Ummmmm….” just shake your head and walk away.  Ask again on a good day.

What resolutions have you made this year?

The question asked for my ideas regarding the purpose of a public school education in the life of a middle school student.  After writing my answer, I posed that question on my Facebook wall and asked my friends to give me their ideas.  Their responses were somewhat close to my own in some ways.

Here is what I wrote:

Middle school is the most interesting part of education.  Our school is grades 6 to 8, and it is really more three schools than just one.  Students change so much in each year, so middle school has to take on several roles as well.

First, middle school is a time of exploration.  Middle school students are exploring relationships, extra-curricular interests, academic strengths, boundaries put in place by anyone in authority, and a lot about themselves.  Middle school should be a place where the exploration has meaning.  Students learn how to act in society, how to be kind and giving (sometimes they learn this by experiencing the opposite), how to organize, study, and a host of other lessons aimed at making them more productive students and citizens.

Second, middle school is a time of preparation.  The changes from self-contained classrooms to changing teachers every period, from cubbies to lockers, from no dress code to some form of dress code, and more, help students create a slow, deliberate readiness to life in high school and beyond.  Middle school is a place that helps foster this readiness for life.

Third, middle school is a time of decision-making.  Students begin to decide who they are in the world.  They also decide if they like school or not or if they are good at it or not.  Some research indicates many decide in middle school whether or not to even stay in school.  As such, middle school takes on an even greater role in engaging students in academics (learning in general), exploring career choices (discovering what they like and what they are good at), socialization (how to treat others as well as deciding how they want to be treated), and aiding in the formulation of a beneficial world view (citizenship, family, friends, etc).

I would love for you to leave me some comments as to your own thoughts.  What did I get wrong?  What did I leave out?  Or better yet, what did I get right?

The walk was beautiful.  And hard.  I got to see some gorgeous mountains to the right and left of me as I trekked up the hill.  None of us really knew what the trail was like since we had never been there before.  Oh sure, one of us had looked at it on a map, but that really didn’t do it justice.  Each of us had a pre-conceived idea of the hike ahead and each of us, it turned out, were wrong.

You see, I thought starting at out 5,050 feet was pretty high.  I sort of envisioned a trail meandering around the tip of the mountain tops with a few uphill and a few downhill slopes.  I thought the entire trail would be like the beginning: flat and wide with steps braced by fallen logs.  Someone had gone to great lengths to make the beginning of my journey as easy as possible.

As we went along the trail, rising to over 6,100 feet, the trail began to change.  Suddenly it was more wild with rocks and water and foliage hanging over the sides.  It was more narrow and much more difficult to maneuver.  I had strategically placed myself 3rd in a line of 3.  At first that was so I didn’t have to set the pace.  But later I realized it was better to follow someone along the trail and watch how they proceed.  I could see steps that were difficult and make minor changes in direction from the leader so that my walk was somehow easier than his.

When we hit 6,100 feet we thought we were fairly near our goal, which was a large outcrop of rock on the knob of a mountain top called Charlie’s Bunion.  We were wrong.  We began a fairly fast descent back down to 5,500 feet over another 1.5 miles.  I realized that going downhill so fast was just as difficult as the climb, but for different reasons.  On the climb my legs were tired from stepping up and up and up.  My calves and quads were feeling the burn.  On the downward slope my legs felt better, but not my feet and knees hurt.  The angle of the slope made my feet slide into the front end of the inside of my tennis shoes.  My toes were hurting and that caused my entire foot to ache.  The change in the angle of my ankles caused extra pressure on my knees.  I was reminded of a talk I had with a runner a week earlier and how people who train for marathons find that training to run downhill is just as important and training to climb hills.  More injuries occur on the downward slopes where we think the hike or run is easier.  In reality, it is equally hard to climb the hill as it is to go down the hill.  But hard in different ways.

We enjoyed Charlie’s Bunion for about 30 minutes.  The views were spectacular.  We met a few other hikers there.  Everyone was resting and eating something.  It was a welcome break.

Most people on this trail never make it to Charlie’s Bunion.  For many it wasn’t their goal in the first place.  They walk in enough to get some beautiful views and walk back out again.  How did I know this?  Because the last mile toward our destination was the roughest, most underused portion of the trail.  It was very narrow and wet and covered over with brush.  I suddenly began quoting “The Road Less Traveled” in my head.  Going all the way to this small bald rock really was making all the difference for me.

Then it was time for the return.

The 2nd half of a long hike can be brutal.  Your body is already tired.  Your muscles are calling you a wimp.  And you know they are right.  And then it hit us.  That fast downward slope that felt so good on some of our leg muscles had just done an about face and was now the steepest part of the mountain to climb.  Our tired legs, breathless lungs, and weary minds stopped often. Yet on we trudged.  This was no place to stop and quit.

After reaching the 6,100 feet level again, we started the 2.5 mile decline into hell.  One thing I learned about hiking started to really become a concrete reality in my head: Take care of your feet.  My feet hurt.  And now my toes were forced back into the front of my shoes.  My knees hated every time we met a stair step that had to be traversed in reverse.

It was on this leg of the journey that I hit “the wall.”  I realized then and there that most of my life can be summed up as a quitter.  If I hit the wall on a treadmill, I just hit stop and go do something else.  I even joked that it might be worth it to fall down and break my leg and just wait to get airlifted to a hospital.  But I kept most of my thoughts of quitting to myself.  I wondered if I was the only one feeling this way.

It was about 1.5 miles away from our car that I realized part of my problem.  I had established the wrong goal from the beginning.  My goal was to get to Charlie’s Bunion.  In reality, my goal should have been to get back to the car.  This became crystal clear as a young man in his early twenties came running down the trail behind us.  Yes, I said running.  He was skipping from rock to rock and jumping over things that jutted out in his way.  We gladly stopped to let him by, but he stopped for a minute with us and asked if any of us had a map of the trail.  You see, he knew there was one particular trail that went off from ours, but he couldn’t remember the name of it.  He wanted to add about 5 miles to his hike that day, and thought that would be a good plan.  Luckily, he wasn’t standing close enough to me to deck him.  But then, I was probably too tired to take the swing anyway.

I love metaphors.  And this hike has given me many to ponder.  Here are a few:

• Make sure you are headed toward the right goal in life.  If you are, the entire journey will be enjoyable.  If not, the journey will hurt every step of the way.
• There is no map that can accurately prepare you for the journey.  Watch those in front of you.  Do what works.  Change what doesn’t.
• Hike your own Hike.  OK, this is not original to me.  One of the guys we met that has hiked for 25 years gave us this quote.  He meant every hiker should wear what they want, hike where they want, carry what they want, and don’t be conformed to what they think a hiker should do.  I translate to be “Live your own life and not someone else’s.”
• It really is all about your mindset.  Your mind is more powerful than your body.  It can sit your body down, or it can pick your body up.  Be determined.  Don’t quit.  Its just pain.
• Travel with a buddy or two.  The Bible makes this point in a couple of ways.  First, if one falls down and he has a partner there is someone to help pick him back up (words of wisdom on a long hike).  Second, anyone can break a cord of just one string.  Some can even break a cord of 2 strings.  But a cord made out of 3 strings is not easily broken.  We all agreed that if we had been alone, we would have turned around before we got to Charlie’s Bunion.
• When you think the journey is over…its not.  Charlie’s Bunion wasn’t the end.  Even making it back to the car wasn’t the end.  I’ve still got more journey today.

What about you?  Do you have a metaphor you would like to share?  Or is there a life lesson from this post that you found and I didn’t mention?  Leave me and the rest of the world a comment!

A larger question, for me at least, emerged this week at our DEN LC Symposium.  I was leading a group discussion on the power and pitfalls of allowing students the unique privilege of using their cell phones in class.  Our group was sharing best practice ideas of how cell phones could be used to create podcasts, produce videos, snap pictures for assignments, respond to questions using text, view video tutorials hosted at iTunes and much more.  It was a great discussion.

Then one of our many STAR educators hit me upside the head with the reality stick.  Lisa Parisi said something to the effect that it sounded like we had discovered this great tool and we were trying to find creative ways to use it.  Instead, she continued, we should be looking at curriculum and standards and developing lesson plans and only then deciding which piece of technology (if any) would best help us and the students in the learning process.

That was a light-bulb-over-the-head moment for me.

This article from the Washington Post helps demonstrate her point.  It discusses the boom in sales for Interactive Whiteboards such as SMART and Promethean.  Our school just purchased a Promethean board and short throw projectors for every classroom.  The article talks of teachers who are using the product with minimal results.

DISCLAIMER: To be fair, those teachers frustrated with the lack of gains using an IWB seem to be those that are just using them as a glorified way to lecture; a new PowerPoint if you will.  Reading the article you will find few who are actually engaging students with the boards.  But I think Lisa’s point is still valid: design the lesson first and choose the technology second.

Teachers are under pressure now to “use those boards” every day in their classes.  This seems reasonable.  After all, schools just spent tens of thousands of dollars purchasing them, installing them, and training teachers to use them.  But what if it isn’t the best tool for the job?  What if you don’t need technology at all?

I teach in a computer lab.  My kids get hands-on computer experience nearly everyday.  Yet, even in that environment there are days when our kids won’t touch a computer.  We want them in circles talking.  We want them manipulating things together on a table top.  Could I put them in a chat room for the discussion?  Sure!  Will I? Well….it depends.

If the goal of the lesson is to get kids to work collaboratively to discuss a particular aspect of a story, or design a math lesson for their peers, or talk about their summer vacation, then no, they don’t need a computer for that.  If, however, the goal is to demonstrate for them the power of collaboration in a Web 2.0 environment where they learn how to discuss these things together at home outside of class, then yes, a chat room or a Google Doc would be perfect.

We are pushed so hard to earn the title of a 21st Century Classroom.  But whether we like it or not, this is the 21st Century.  Every classroom is now a 21st Century Classroom with or without technology.

So. back to my question.

I have to change my paradigm a bit.  The lesson has to come first.  It contains the “protein” that solidifies the reason to use the technology.  Not just any old technology.  The right technology.  Sometimes that’s a computer. Sometimes a phone. Sometimes an iPod. Sometimes an IWB.  And sometimes it is something just as revolutionary in its day: a pencil, a crayon, or a foldable.

Once I realized that the exhibit hall “officially” opened at 9:30, and I was already standing in the conference center at 8, I decided I would look again at the offerings of workshops and see if I could redeem some time.  That’s how I wound up in Hall Davidson’s session on Epson’s Bright Link project and IWB combination.

After that, I spent most of my time in the exhibit hall just wandering around to see what was there.  I put together a little montage of what I saw in the video below.

While Traci Blazosky was presenting on DE Streaming and Glogster in the Discovery Education booth, I struck up a conversation with the founder of Glogster who had stopped by to see her work.  Well, actually, I was noticing him looking at the presentation while standing in the aisle and, being a former sales/marketing guy, thought I should help engage him more in what was going on.  It went something like this:

Me: Are you familiar with Glogster?

Him: Kind of.  I’m Mr. Glogster.

Once I thought the various shades of reds and orange had disappeared from my face, I began telling him how we used Glogster in our classes at Lake Forest this last year.  I mentioned to him that ENA had unblocked the education version of Glogster, but not the regular Glogster.com site.  As a result, we were unable to successfully add DE Streaming videos to our student Glogs.  He verified that the videos for both sites are pulled through the same pipeline and gave me some information to pass along to ENA to help solve that problem for next year.  Sweet.

The afternoon was less eventful.  Well, at least less embarrassing.  I got to meet the founder of BrainPop and pick up a cool Moby ball cap.  I will wear it proudly.

MaryAnn Sansonetti and I went to a social gathering sponsored by Compass Learning at The Tavern.  Since neither of us are customers of theirs, the gathering was a little boring (sorry Compass Learning).  As a result, even the prospect of possibly winning a new iPad in the evening’s raffle couldn’t keep us there much more than about 30 minutes.

In a conference as overwhelmingly big as ISTE, it is the small things that really matter.  Seeing Epson’s new technology.  A chance meeting with a website founder who might help an entire state free up his product.  Lunch with friends from Pennsylvania.  Coffee with a friend from South Carolina.  Late night dessert with both.  These are the successes of ISTE.

I totally agree.

So I’ve been thinking of ways to make kids patient problem solvers in language arts.  We drill and kill all these rules for spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and more.  But I’m afraid kids lose a fundamental truth needed to understand their importance: Why are we doing this?

With text messaging and other forms of quick, concise, truncated communication, kids have lost sight of what makes text messaging work.  Even those messages have certain rules.  Even abbreviations take on a consistent form in order to be understood.  One simply can’t shorten LOL to LL and have anyone understand what it means.  By the same token, I still get a kick out of using ROFLMAO with people that have never seen that acronym before.  It is total Greek to them until they understand the words behind it.

This led me to wonder about going back to Greek in order to get kids to understand the need for grammar rules.  In college, I had three wonderful years of Koine Greek, the derivative of Greek used to write the New Testament.  The original Greek texts were written in all capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation.  I wondered what would happen if I gave kids the note below on the first day of class?

After kids have taken a shot at re-writing the paragraph in a readable form of text, I would want to know the answer to one question: What general rules would you develop to make this and all writing easier to read? I would hope to hear rules about spacing between words, capitalizing only the important words, capitalizing only first letters, adding different punctuation for sentences and questions, and more.

Perhaps by struggling with the why of grammar we could develop patient problem solvers that could correctly use the how of grammar.

What do you think?

This morning, that song came to me while walking through Wal-Mart at 6:15.  I usually love Wal-Mart in very early morning hours.  There are no customers there to speak of.  You can find all kinds of employees in practically every aisle while they restock shelves.  It is very easy to get someone’s attention to help you find nearly anything.

This morning I didn’t need help.  I knew where the blank DVDs were, and I had a pretty good idea about the clear packing tape dispenser I needed.  So my walk through Wal-Mart lasted a total of 3 minutes.

Then I went to check out.

Because it was the early hours with no customers backed up in long lines of overflowing carts, there was one cash register open.  This particular Wal-Mart has over 30 cash registers, but only the 15 items or less lane was available.

I walked up to the register and laid my two items down for the man in the khaki colored pants and blue t-shirt to check me out.  (Just as a side note, sometimes a dress code really doesn’t matter).  Without a word to me, the man turned around and walked away.  I was left in the only available check out lane and there was no one there to do the checking out.

I continued to stand there while four other employees walked by the register and merely looked at the growing frustration on my face and continued on their way.  Finally, the checkout person came back (along with another customer he was evidently helping) and proceeded to move me backwards away from the register so he could help the person he brought with him.

Nothing was said.  No apologies made.  No explanations.  Just rudeness and a total lack of customer care.

If I hadn’t been wearing my DE Streaming Beyond the Textbook t-shirt I might have responded differently.  (Sometimes dress code does make a difference).  But since I was easily identifiable by the personal branding I had chosen that morning, I smiled, slid my credit card, gathered my belongings, and walked out of the store to let my blood pressure go down just slightly.

Think about it.  An entire store full of employees working away to get things ready for the shopping spree of the day, and one…just one…ruined my entire experience.

Sometimes that’s just one student.  Just one can ruin an entire day of teaching.  Sometimes that’s just one teacher.  Just one can make a student hate school for years to come. Sometimes that’s just one parent.  One administrator.  One professional development opportunity gone bad.  One badly needed website that’s blocked.  One email written in haste.

Michael Jackson had it wrong.  One bad apple really can ruin the whole bunch.

Always do your best to be a good apple.  We don’t all have to be the same type of apple.  Simply being a good one is enough.